By Nausicaa Chu
Most people pass the Vestavia Hills Corner Garden at 40 miles per hour. The garden is a brief flash of pink, yellow and orange before cars whisk into the grays and beiges of Highway 31. The garden is in a strange spot—nestled in a corner between a four-lane highway and Shades Crest Road, surrounded by power lines, highway signs and noisy cars.
But Rick Cybulsky, President of the Vestavia Hills Corner Garden Club, believes the highly visible location furthers the club’s goals. “Our mission is to provide something beautiful in the community,” he says. “We’d like to be able to share what we do on a regular basis.”
For over 40 years, volunteers have mulched, pruned, watered, planted and re-planted the Corner Garden. Over time, it has become more than a pretty spot on an intersection. It has brought together a community of gardeners, earned the admiration of passing drivers and attracted the attention of people from England, France and even New Zealand.
Henry Chilton and Henderson Walker first heard about the plot of land in the 1980s. They needed to do a project for the Alabama County Extension Service’s Master Gardener program, which trains gardeners to educate the community. But when they asked the plot’s owner if they could beautify her land, she wasreluctant.
The landowner’s friend happened to know Chilton and Walker. She formally introduced the pair, settling the owner’s discomfort. The two men recruited their friends, set to work and kept working—for decades. Originally formed as a Men’s Garden Club, the group has since expanded to include men and women. “I now call it the Corner Garden,” Cybulsky explains.
Every Friday morning, a regular group of six works for hours in the garden. They battle relentless heat and equally relentless weeds. “It’s a great experience because it’s like a little community,” Cybulsky says. “We want to be a community of gardening friends, and we want to learn more and more about what it is, what gardening means and how it fits into the grand scheme of things.”
It is one thing to look at the Corner Garden from a car. It is another thing to see it from the inside. On a warm July morning, the arbor at the entrance is covered by a thick tangle of vines. A stone path arcs around the green field at the garden’s center. The air is thick with the scent of flowers, and a dusting of white blossoms coats stone benches and plants. “One of our missions is to have something that’s flowering all throughout the year,” says Cybulsky.
Stone curly-haired cherubs stand amid green seas of ferns. A flash of orange and white—a chipmunk—darts among the shrubs. A wooden birdhouse, given in memory of longtime club member Fred Dyess, stands on one side.
Plants come in all shapes and colors. There are the long, narrow leaves of the roof iris, the yellow, daisy-like flowers of the brown-eyed Susan and the white flowerheads of the magnolia. Cybulsky tries to balance non-native plants, like the Japanese maple, with plants native to Alabama. “I do want to emphasize the idea of helping to sustain more than just the plants—the pollinators and the birds,” he says.
The rumbling of cars is a constant noise. But there are other sounds, too: the humming of cicadas, the wind rustling the trees, the water rushing over a stone fountain. “When you get into it, you don’t pay as much attention to the traffic,” says Cybulsky.
The garden has been recognized by the Jefferson County Beautification Board, and it has also been recognized on the international level.
On April 17, a blogger named “Topdock” posted six pictures of the Corner Garden online, including a red-spotted admiral butterfly and two kinds of iris. Comments followed: a Welsh gardener praised the “fabulous iris,” a London gardener admired the “gorgeous” butterfly and a French gardener noted that “the flowering is much further ahead than here.” The post was liked by people in New Zealand, Germany and three parts of the United Kingdom.
“Topdock” is Cybulsky’s online alias (a retired doctor, Cybulsky says the username “Topdoc” was taken, so he added a “k”). Cybulsky is a member of the Six on Saturday group, where around 20 gardeners from across the globe share six garden pictures every Saturday. “I really find it to be so interesting that we have this connection with these people that I otherwise would have no connection with,” he says.
The gardeners trade notes about butterflies, the similarities and differences of their plants and climate. A recent topic of discussion has been the heat wave engulfing Western Europe. “Here, we put up with 90-degree weather every summer,” laughs Cybulsky. “They’re not as used to it as we are.”
But the most meaningful part of gardening is local, Cybulsky says. As the gardeners work on Friday morning, cars stop for the traffic light on Shades Crest Road. Drivers thank the gardeners or open the rear window to let their children and dogs admire the plants. “I get a real kick out of that,” says Cybulsky. “You get that acknowledgement from people going by, ‘yeah, we see this, we see you, we like this,’ so it keeps you going, it’s encouraging.”
Diagonally across from the garden, there is another corner on the intersection of Highway 31 and Shades Crest Road. It is a bare stretch of grass. Without Chilton and Walker, without decades of upkeep and without the current gardeners to battle weeds and heat, the Corner Garden might look the same. But the team of gardeners has no plans on stopping. “The only thing that stops us is bad weather,” says Cybulsky.
To learn more about the Vestavia Hills Corner Garden, visit cornergardenvestavia.blog, the “Vestavia Hills Mens Garden” on Facebook or topdock.substack.com.
